Mom Turns Activist for Chicken Freedom

“I didn’t want to start a war. I just wanted to keep chickens.”

Bobbi Wilkey is a homeschool mom who found herself in the crosshairs of a battle with three of the four notorious Commissioners of Catoosa County who were denied a place on the Republican ballot last year due to their un-Republican behavior. 

Bobbi moved to Tunnel Hill with her husband in 2020 to escape the harmful leftist policies destroying California. They are refugees seeking a more free, simple, family-friendly life. 

Bobbi has five school-aged children. She spends her days around the kitchen table in their suburban Catoosa County home, teaching her children and feeding them nutritious food. When she is not there, she is usually by the side of birthing women, working as a doula or teaching roller skating. 

“We were super excited to live where there were lots of conservative people,” Bobbi said.

Bobbi knew nothing about the Catoosa County commissioners, and didn’t set out to be any kind of political activist or culture warrior. The war came to her – to her front door. 

On April 19th 2022 Bobbi was anxiously awaiting a violation notice from the Catoosa County government. It was 8:00 am and she had just learned from a neighbor that a zoning official was on his way to give notice of a violation to the Wilkey family regarding their backyard chickens.

Bobbi sprang into action. 

By 8:30 she had all the chickens packed up and removed from the house to a big dog kennel on a friend’s farm. Then she and her children waited in the homeschool room with bated breath, uncertain about the fate of their pets. 

Then it happened. But there was no inspection, no altercation. Just a slip of paper silently taped to the door that charged them with having “Non-domesticated animals in a residential zone” and a handwritten addition “chickens”.

“Our chickens had to be removed in 10 days or we would have a $1,000 fine for every day we kept them. But they didn’t even inspect to see if we had chickens!”

The Wilkey’s backyard looked like it belonged to the quintessential suburban family. Completely fenced off with a play set, a couple garden boxes, and a small chicken coop. It was half an acre and the property was zoned residential, but bordered a 100 acre cow pasture. 

They later learned that the violation notice was the result of one complaint email being sent to the Catoosa County zoning authorities.

“It was just one angry lady, and I had never had a bad interaction with her,” said Bobbi.

One of the children had accidentally left the door of the chicken coop ajar, and a chicken temporarily escaped the coop and was quickly returned, but not before being observed by a neighbor.

Unlike a nuisance ordinance, which requires three people to sign affidavits to warrant someone coming out to your house to give a warning, the Wilkey’s lost their chickens and got entangled in this controversy as a result of one email.

“I was completely blind-sided. Before buying chickens, we had asked all our direct neighbors if it would bother them if we got chickens. They were fine with it.”

THE COMMISSIONERS

“That’s when I went to my first Commissioners meeting.” 

Bobbi brought her family and explained that she didn’t even have chickens on her property at the time the violation was issued. Furthermore, she argued that chicken ownership is objectively good. It is not criminal or immoral. Families have raised yard fowl on their private property for thousands of years. It gives children chores by which they can contribute to the family economy, and it teaches them responsibility. It helps with pests and provides fertilizer. 

Producing your own food is a fundamental human freedom and one would think the benefits would be apparent, especially to commissioners who claimed to be Republicans. Isn’t that the party of freedom, capitalism, and family values?

“I have five small children. Inflation has hit our family so hard. Food is expensive to feed our children, and we would really love to have a few backyard chickens.”

Even Bobbi’s children spoke before the commissioners. 

Vanita Hullander, one of the commissioners who would later be rejected by the Republican Party for her anti-Republican governance, expressed sympathy. “I feel your pain. I’m attached to my chickens too.”

The Commissioners asked for Bobbi’s phone number and said they would give her a call. The ordinance the Wilkey family allegedly violated was related to “non-domesticated animals” and was highly subjective. 

“We would ask the Commissioners ‘Where does it say we can’t have chickens?’ And they couldn’t tell me — because there is no law against it! They could never point to the law that I had broken, because there wasn’t one.”

The frustration led to exasperation. Bobbi was determined to fix the ambiguity in the law and ensure no other Catoosa family would ever have to endure this again. She rallied her friends and neighbors to attend commission meetings.

“If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s rallying people. I contacted people on Facebook, started a Facebook group for chicken owners, and eventually had hundreds of people supporting me.”

Bobbie and a group of citizens even volunteered their time to help write an ordinance that protected chicken freedom, and develop a policy for cases in which chickens might become a nuisance to someone’s neighbors. Others believed a nuisance ordinance was sufficient. But they were united against oppressive and excessively restrictive ordinances, as well as the enforcement of non-existant laws.

To the shock and dismay of the citizens, the commissioners ignored the citizen’s draft ordinance and introduced their own ordinance severely restricting chicken freedom. Commissioner Chuck Harris claimed authorship of the outrageous ordinance, though some chicken advocates suspect it was written by someone else.

“The new ordinance the Commissioners drafted was unbelievable. Like something straight out of California!”

Bobbi felt betrayed. How could they do this after promising to help us? 

“We had been attending commissioner meetings for a full year.”

“I think it was an oversight, said Bobbi. What they should have said, was ‘Oops! Our mistake, we will tell our people to stop giving tickets [for owning chickens].’ But they couldn’t admit they were wrong, so they stuck to their guns all the way.”

If the image of a mother and her children pleading for chickens before a dais with a heavy-handed authority figure seated on the other side sounds medieval, it is. And yet history repeats itself because human nature remains the same through the centuries.

“They promised we could still have chickens,” said Bobbi with emotion.

The citizens of Catoosa County couldn’t have imagined what would happen next.

Larry Black, the Commission Chairman at the time, posted on Facebook about the chicken ordinance and asked for opinions. He had thousands respond defending the freedom to raise chickens, even after deleting the initial post. Only a handful of comments were negative. Similarly, the Commissioners asked for people to send emails to them and an overwhelming number supported chickens. 

The ordinance the commissioners ultimately passed was outrageous. The ordinance said no roosters, and only allowed a maximum of 8 hens. It made it illegal to sell or give away eggs or fertilizer. Citizens were forbidden to slaughter birds on their own land. The coop was required to be 25 feet from any adjoining property, and had to have sides and a roof, meaning chickens were not allowed to free range or feed in a run. For families wanting the health benefits of “free-range” or “pasture raised” eggs, compliance with this onerous ordinance would defeat the purpose of having chickens in the first place.

Those opposing chicken freedom made the case that anyone could just drive to Costco to purchase their chicken meat and eggs. But for Bobbi and her neighbors, they might as well have said: “Let them eat cake!”

Commissioner Vanita Hullander, instead of defending her fellow chicken owners, said she got rid of her chickens in order to comply. It was this situation that prompted Bobbi to become involved in the Catoosa GOP. 

“I had never been involved in the party prior to this, but I’m very outspoken as a conservative. It’s disappointing to see our local government corrupt just like all of our other government, just on a lesser scale.”

Before long there were between 100-200 people attending commissioner meetings, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. 

“When they raised property taxes, they never had that many people attend, but they did for chickens,” said Bobbi.

Bobbi was successful in persuading her Homeowner’s Association to allow families to keep chickens and even had a couple journalists come to her home to interview her about her quest for chicken freedom. However, the massive crowds voicing their concerns at commission meetings were dismissed by the commissioners saying, “You know, we have 70,000 people to represent.”

Bobbi believes her current incumbent commissioners have a serious integrity problem and she was grateful the Catoosa GOP utilized the accountability rule to prevent the commissioners from qualifying to run on the Republican ballot.

“The GOP are the people actually watching everything that the commissioners are doing.”

“We fought this for two years, and we had an endless amount of support — except from the commissioners. They said, ‘You need to come to commissioners meetings.’ But they don’t listen to anything we say, and it doesn’t make any difference.”

Bobbi believes it is a spiritual problem, and the Catoosa Commissioners are sick in their souls.

“I saw Chuck Harris raise his hand [in the vote] to raise property taxes, and I’ve read articles about the vote, but he will tell you straight to your face he didn’t raise taxes.”

Bobbi has become known as “The Chicken Lady.”

“My best friend asked me, ‘Why are you doing this? It isn’t paying money.’ Most people do not care, and they don’t want to know. But the chicken thing was very personal for me and all these people.”

Bobbi has made some powerful enemies, and feels like a whistleblower.

“I feel like the commissioners are after me. I live in fear, because I just discovered how much stuff these people are into, and it’s terrifying. 

“When I first started, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I literally just wanted to have chickens in my backyard.”

Now that she has experienced first hand how the Catoosa Commissioners have abused their authority, Bobbi feels keenly the importance of holding government accountable. 

Catoosa GOP has welcomed people like Bobbi with open arms, and has increased their numbers significantly as a result of the citizen outcry at commission meetings. Bobbi has been one of the many Catoosa County Republicans supporting the Catoosa GOP in their lawsuit and accountability efforts. 

The lawsuit is still pending, awaiting a decision from the 11th Circuit Court. The outcome of the court’s judgement will have a significant impact on Catoosa families like Bobbi’s.